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ROCK'S CANON; Ignoring 'Progrock'

Regarding ''In Rock's Canon, Anyone and Everyone'' [Dec. 26]: Were this article written 10 years ago, I would have winced. Now I'm just amused. Ann Powers may wax ecumenical about rock's canon, but she made not one glancing reference to a form of music, still alive and evolving (as any Knitting Factory denizen knows), that was both highly popular and critically acclaimed in the early to mid-70's: progressive rock.

And no, ''Stairway to Heaven'' doesn't quite count.

How could one neglect the protean Frank Zappa, who, in more than 80 albums created between the 60's and the 90's, explored, dabbled in, lampooned, resurrected and paid homage to nearly every style of 20th-century music, let alone rock?

Cultist am I? Sure. I owe my current musical taste to the complex jazz-and-classical influenced radio-rock that caught my ear as a teenager. Sure, much of the Emerson Lake and Palmer, Genesis, Yes, Gentle Giant and Focus that I loved as a teenager is horribly overblown, aesthetically questionable on any number of grounds and perhaps too effete to reflect more recent assumptions about ''rockist'' values. But one cannot deny the facts of history.

Check WNEW-FM's playlist archive from '72 to '75. This music was as mainstream as any subgenre of rock one could name. What killed it wasn't simply the emergence of punk rock (the official line), but the second wave of oil shocks that deepened stagflation. By the time '78 rolled around, record albums were routinely twice the price they had been four years earlier, and the major labels had decided to stop subsidizing loss leaders, their rabid cult followings and critical accolades be hanged.

Since the number of late-cohort boomers who grew up with this music is not insignificant, one wonders why it has been so assiduously excluded from the boomer-catering marketing category egregiously termed ''classic rock.'' According to VH-1's official history, the entire ''progrock'' era can be summarized by a three-minute clip of a Rick Wakeman piano solo, replete with a voice-over intoning about self-indulgence and overarching ambitions.

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Is this a deliberate form of corporate censorship? Art through demographics? The boardroom reasoning might go like this: since progrock fans are connoisseurs who actively seek out the different and aren't afraid of the obscure, well then, the tiny catalog houses can -- quite expensively, to be sure -- keep that music and its history alive for them, so what's the problem?

There is only a problem if one believes we have a common musical culture. Or, if one resents the idea of history as commodity.

Young bands today may not realize that there was actually a time in the hallowed history of rock when it was considered hip and relevant to tinker with the nuts and bolts of music -- not merely with fuzz timbres, beat boxes and new tunings but at the molecular level, with meter, harmony, counterpoint, song form. Without the example and inspiration of this cleverly excised bit of rock history (and many critics abet the syndrome by setting forth One True Version of rock values), can we really blame them for turning out ever-more-indistinguishable three-chord slag?

And three-chord slag is a standardized product, based on a formula and thus easy to duplicate. Progrock, with its cornucopia of influences and substyles, with no clear formula or approach (every progrock band sounds unique) is hardly the example the majors might want its next roster of big sellers to emulate.